Back in August of 2007 I began talking with my wife about starting a small group that would meet at our house. The purpose of the group would be to reconnect with friends, create an atmosphere where people burned by “church” could come into a community, and hopefully spend some good time in study of the scriptures. We have no name for the group or ever intended to try and classify it. Sometimes it acts as a bible study and sometimes it functions like a much deeper community. Thankfully I think more and more the traditional definition of church is being challenged by groups like these. When considering how to structure our time together I’ve found that the most successful groups are ones that remove as many barriers to immediate discord as possible. If I had chosen a book to study or a topic there’s a good chance that scripture would not be the driving force behind our theological shaping but likely our egos. So instead I opted for asking the members of our group to come together to read scripture aloud in the hopes that it would be the catalyst for our discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
I must say I’ve been very impressed by the creators over at ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is a wonderful Web2.0 startup that allows you to take any DV camera or webcam and broadcast yourself to the world. The features are rich and the price is right (right as in free). So what do you get when you sign up for an account at ustream.tv? Well first off you get an excellent and easy to use interface for creating your own shows. Secondly, the options seem endless in that you can customize the experience from having user moderated forums to password protected feeds. When the stream is up and running you embed the show into a website using there easy to use embed code or give a direct link to a website where people can watch. You can broadcast and record all at the same time as well as control a variety of features through the pop up interface. After you’re finished you can choose to leave the pre-recorded events up for later viewing as wells as transcode the video for download and later use. I don’t know how they did it but they’ve made personal broadcasting a breeze. Hopefully I can throw up some content in the near future to let you see what I’m talking about. I can already see a lot of potential for use at the University. I am hoping that we can begin broadcasting forum discussions, special presentations, and maybe even some classroom instruction.
I wrote about this last year before changing web hosting companies and just now got around to bringing this post over to my new blog. For sometime now I’ve been using Google’s co-op tool to create customized searches. When I was tasked with creating a repository of tutorials for our e-learning software I needed a way to make it quickly search-able of both the website and our expanding wiki site. So I turned to Google, like I do for so many things, to see what they had to offer. What I found was a wonderful way to make customized searches. Google coop lets you specify exactly which items are safe for the search engine to use. I control which sites it crawls and in what format it gives the results to the students. So far I couldn’t have been more pleased. As I began to play with this more I realized what a great tool this could be for educators of all content areas. Now instructors can choose to create customized searches that are appropriate for the students to use. So if you’re a history teacher looking to create a portal for students to search the web with this is your answer. If you’re a Literature teacher that’s asking the students to write about poetry here’s your chance to create a custom Poetry search. This search can be integrated into wikis, blogs, or any old web page you might want to create.
So I stumbled upon a great little tool today called ZoomIt. ZoomIt allows the user to zoom in and annotate on a specific portion of the computer screen. I wrote recently about how I’ve been using Jing to record videos and images from my screen for help desk questions from instructors. Jing allows you to annotate a picture but provides no ability to annotate a video. This being it’s only real setback ZoomIt gives me greater control over what I’m recording and focusing on as well as the ability to annotate live. I’ve included some video below of me using it. I’ve just started playing with it today so I’m still working it out but you get the idea at least. What’s nice too is that with the tablet computers we use and support this works well with the pen touch interface. Did I mention it’s only 44K?
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I would have to say one of my favorite tools that Google has bundled with their Gmail service has been the Google alerts. Google alerts are really nothing more than predefined daily searches of the web. What’s nice is that with Google alerts any topic that’s of interest to me on the web will be neatly condensed into an email and given to me in my inbox every morning. So whether it’s a few authors that I like to keep up with or searches related to my job I can always find new and interesting articles, blog posts, videos and more on the web. What I like is that it takes the short description of an RSS feed and allows me the flexibility to adapt it to whatever my interests are. Below are some pictures of how I use the alerts. I’ve also set up filtering and labeling in Gmail to be able to easily organize and manage the alerts in one place.
